16.4 Intellectual Property
A large area of disagreement centers on whether intellectual property laws and protections such as copyrights, patents, trade secrets, and trademarks should apply at all to digital media, and, if so, how they can be adapted to the changing technologies. The question of who owns intellectual property and what rights the owners have to that property, including software and databases, is complex and controversial.
On one side are those who believe that virtually all technology and nonpersonal information that could be useful to people should be freely available. The journalist Steven Levy writes, “Access to computers—and anything that might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total” ...
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